Category Archives: Games

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events.

Superstar is a massively multiplayer real-world game, tested at the 2005 Ubicomp conference in Tokyo. The game users Japanese Puri Kura sticker-clubs as a starting point for a playful experiment in social networks, automated phonecam image analysis, and urban visual culture.

The goal of the game is to see and be seen using swarms of microscopic images woven through the complex fabric of Tokyo streetlife. Players use only their phonecam and a sheet of tiny Puri Kura self-portrait stickers.

Players place their stickers wherever they want, and then “collect” the stickers of other players by shooting them with phonecams. Mobot technology automatically recognizes the sticker from the image, and assigns points to the player on the sticker and the player who shoots the sticker. Though the game, players become tiny pop icons and attention is refocused on this parallel sticker population, an echo of the crowds around us.

When Dr. Adrian David Cheok (NUS) wanted to create an exciting augmented reality game, he chose to remake the first video game to ever introduce a character – the legendary Pac Man. Cheok literally stepped into Pacman’s shoes in this first-person-shooter-like real world game